Stop Making Fun Of Me: Confessions Of An Early iPhone Adopter

By alexchasickJuly 2, 2008

Those of us who bought iPhones when they came out haven’t been very popular over the last year. We’ve been viewed as impulse-buying fanboys who got suckered into paying to beta-test an incomplete product on an inferior network. Then Steve Jobs sold us out. Now our co-workers won’t stop making fun of us. I bought my iPhone on June 29th, I still love it, and I can’t wait to buy a new one next week. Inside, my reasons why.

For all of the iPhone’s flaws—no 3G, no multimedia messaging, no flash (on the camera) or Flash (on the browser)—it’s still got more features than any phone I’ve used. The day after I got it, my fiancee and I drove out to Shenandoah for a friend’s party, and got lost. We always travel with an atlas, but it was useless for rural roads, and if I hadn’t had the iPhone and Google Maps, I might have actually had to get out of the car and ask directions. A GPS-equipped car could have done the same thing, but I don’t drive much, though, and as it turns out, I’m most in need of geographical assistance when I’m stumbling home from some bar, not driving. DC has a lot of circular roads, and although I know Fox & Hounds is near Dupont Circle, it usually wasn’t my first stop, so I couldn’t remember how to get there unless I checked Google Maps. While I’m on the subject of drunk iPhone use, let me also say that having access to YouTube and Wikipedia at a bar or in a hotel that doesn’t have WiFi is worth the full price of the iPhone by itself. (Ironically, if the iPhone had never come out, I not only wouldn’t be able to watch my favorite YouTube video (NSFW) on it, but the video couldn’t have even been made, as the iPhone is heavily featured in the video’s plot.)

Was the $500 I paid for my 4GB iPhone too much? Apple apparently thought so, as they dropped the prices pretty soon after, upsetting early purchasers. But they made up for it, in my opinion, by giving me a $100 Apple Store credit, which I’ve saved until the 3G is released. Before the new iPhones were announced last month, our techie brothers at Gizmodo posted a story called “How I Sold My iPhone In 24 Hours For More Than I Paid.” I followed the advice, and sold my year-old, 4GB iPhone for $300 the day after the 3G was introduced. Along with the credit, that’s $400 I’ve gotten back from my original $500 purchase. The 16GB iPhone will only be $300. Essentially, I’ve gotten to use my iPhone since it came out, and in a week, I’ll have a newer, better one, and $100 extra. Which I’ll use to pay for 20 months of previously free text messages.

“it’s still got more features than any phone I’ve used.”
Not sure how that happened; just about any GSM phone these days is capable of running J2ME apps. You could have loaded Google Maps and Opera Mini on those. YouTube is the only thing you might be missing out on; but even then, most phones nowadays can access YouTube mobile too.

They announced “no commitment” pricing. Activate it (which I presumes unlocks it, or JailBreak it), and take it to any other carrier that it works on. I guess in the US, that’s only T-Mobile.

I didn’t spring for the first one, ‘cos I’m not about to sign a two year contract. I might go for the 3G version, now that I don’t need a new contract. I’m an AT&T customer, but have been contract-free for three years, and like it that way.

This essay or blog entry is a little contrived.. Why the poor me, pity me attitude. I’ve had an iphone from day three, and have never been made fun of. Alex makes it sound like having an iphone is like being a leper.How does this make “shoppers bite back” — more like a where “shoppers exhibit depression”

For those that thing AT&T’s the problem, and that going to another provider is a solution, you have a few roadblocks:

First, the iPhone’s GSM, a global cell phone standard. Since Sprint and (currently) Verizon’s CDMA, they’re out. T-Mobile is GSM as well as AT&T… but T-Mobile doesn’t have 3G data service and their coverage map is worse. The best bet *IS* AT&T, unfortunately.

@STrRedWolf: As a current T-Mobile user, let me say that the coverage may be worse, but it’s almost never a significant issue, at least in my experience. They have roaming agreements with almost every GSM provider out there and coverage only craps out in places like the middle of west Texas or deep in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Honestly, I don’t ever plan to/need to go to either of those locales.

Besides, we’re not nickel and dimed for every little service in everyday usage.

iPhones are neat toys that nobody needs in my opinion. My HTC Touch does everything I want it to do for cheaper. But hey, people have different tastes and if it makes you happy, go for it.

I don’t hate on anyone who has an iPhone… just don’t talk loudly about it to your friends while flashing it in front of everyone. I think my dick is pretty cool but I don’t whip it out and toss it around in front of you.

I never felt bad about buying my phone (on day 3), and now I feel even better about since the 2G plans are a hell of a lot more reasonable than the 3G plans. Apple needs to reconsider their exclusivity with the deathstar, since their family plan just cost Apple a couple of 3G sales and a mobile me subscription.

I bought my iPhone on the first day as well, and have not regretted once overpaying the $200, and my only complaint is no MMS. The new iPhone doesn’t solve this, and the only good upgraded feature is GPS. However, I have found the cell tower location works fairly well.

3G is also not available in my area and probably won’t be for some time, thus not a big upgrade in my eyes.

Then you have the fact that the new one costs more over 2 years than the original one did. I used my $100 Apple credit to buy AppleCare, so warrenty running out isn’t an issue for another year either.

I’ll wait until next year when low model iPhones are free with 2 year contract (Razr anyone?).

@Michael Belisle: Take a look at those “cross-hatched, 19th century streets” within a mile of Fox and Hounds. Notice anything in common? That’s right, they’re all named after states. Not being able to find 17th and Q is pathetic and I can barely read a map.

@The Rude Bellman: The amazing thing about the iPhone is the phone is the feature I use the least.

Exactly… that’s why I’m not impressed. For my cell phone is just a phone. I buy the cheapest thing I can find that feels like it can be dropped and sat on multiple times. No, I wouldn’t take it personally if you considered that boring. The OP’s article seems really absurd to me, in fact I’m wondering if it’s a form of satire.

I bought an iPod Touch because I pretty much keep my life on that (it replaced my Palm Pilot) and didn’t want to lose my life if I lost my phone. As tempting as the new iPhone may be, I’d still wait — you don’t know what surprises Steve Jobs has in store 6 weeks after THAT launch.

@SBR249: Sure there are a couple workarounds: Exhibit A or Exhibit B. The rumor mill says a real MMS solution may be coming with the IM client.

@Televiper: My last phone was just a phone too. But do you sometimes have an MP3 player, portable web browser, organizer, GPS, shitty camera or any electronic device other than a phone? That’s the primary benefit for me: having all of those in one slim device whenever I want it.

@Michael Belisle: Actually no. I have a small Sansa Mp3 player and a spiral notebook. I know how to use a map so GPS is unnecessary, and to me surfing the web is something I do at home. I have a fairly good camera that fits in my pocket, and actually does have a flash (if not it’s hard to buy a phone without one). I’m an engineer, I design electronics, I’d just prefer to get away from this stuff. I am very conscious when deciding what I need, and in my mind that fits in with the Consumerist mentality.

I do respect where you’re coming from. That does seem to be your thing. You’d probably disagree with some of the ways I spend my money too :)

I bought a Moto Q9c for $150 and I get to use the fastest data network in the nation (I bench 1M/128K on Sprint). Google Maps? Installed the app as soon as I got it. YouTube? It’s had a WML/WAP version for a looong time. WikiPedia? I use WaPedia for mobile-friendly pages. Music and video? Instead of buying a crap-ton of expensive flash memory, I stream it off of my PC with Orb and don’t worry about getting it into a compatible format. Still waiting for someone to mention something, anything, that the iPhone does that a comparable handset will not.

You know what I really hate about the iPhone? How developers are falling over themselves to build apps for it when platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile represent several times the market share. It especially cheeses me off then the app in question is a webapp? Uh, hello? Anyone heard of WML? Maybe browser detection? It’s called standards, folks, and I would think that the kind of people cheesed at Microsoft for corrupting them wouldn’t give Apple a free pass on it either. I’m surprised that Steve Jobs can even move with all of the folks standing on his coattails to kiss his ring.

Fanboys are overrating the iPhone, but the detractors are just as bad.

What’s special about the iPhone isn’t what it does, but how much BETTER it does it than its competitors. Who the heck is going to buy a blackberry now when you can get an iPhone for the same price?

Cell phones have been terrible over here. The software always sucks and the hardware is barely better. Even the iPhone killers are clueless. Copying the hardware and throwing on crap software at the last minute doesn’t work!

If I hadn’t made it clear at the start of every transaction – the iPhone owners in South America who bought them from me at $750 each… well, I’d take their complaining more seriously. But I made it clear – ALL you will get from me is a shrink-wrapped iPhone brand new from an Apple store. It’s up to you to get it unlocked.

And still they whine. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

As for me, I was ahead a few hundred bucks in Vegas so I decided to eat the iPhone dogfood. It was a nice -if fleeting- moment liberating it from the Deathstar. But the USAGE experience sucked.

@Televiper: My last cell phone was a Nokia 3390, which I got when it was still the newest, smallest phone out there. It was indestructible until I dropped a large ceramic bowl on top of it (a month ago). When it came time to look at new phones, I looked at all of them, Blackberry, Tilt, everything. I wasn’t under a contract, so I checked on phones from different carriers. I didn’t like anything, and had decided to just get another 3390 on eBay, but my mother wanted to see what the iPhone hype was about on the way out of the store.

It was beautiful. It displayed web pages just like my computer, you could pinch the screen to zoom out, its display was bright and shiny… It was the most well-designed thing I’d ever seen. I agonized over spending $400 on a phone, but I decided it was worth it, because I haven’t bought a new phone in almost eight years, and it will probably be another eight before I do it again. I’ve now spent a total of $460 on cell phones in the last ten years.

I have NO regrets. The enjoyment I get out of it every time I use it makes it well worth every penny. And I don’t care what other people think of my iPhone, any more than I cared what they thought of my 3390 (which I also loved).

I do get irritated by the automatic assumption that I must either be an Apple fanboy, a trendy hipster, or a foolish spendthrift. I’m none of these, and I’ll bet the majority of Consumerist-reading iPhone users aren’t either.

I have a windows mobile device for work and a verizon navigator ready phone for home. 9 times out of 10 the directions are easier to follow and are more direct on VZ navigator than on google maps (it uses the same general software as the iPhone). My verizon phone: free with 2 year contract, vz navigator: 2 dollars per use or 10 per month. Winner (in this case and this case only, pretty much the only case that this guy uses to justify his iPhone) Verizon

The point of the iPhone is not that it can do the same thing that many other phones out there can do, its the elegance of its solution. There is a reason people pay $400 for a Kitchen-Aid mixer, when they could use their forearms and a whisk to do the same thing.

I’ve had an iPhone since about a month after they came out. The day they announced the price drop, I called Apple and they gave me back $200 cash – not a credit like they announced the next day, so I paid $400, and I believe its worth every penny.

I have a job for which I need to be resourceful, so every time I am presented with a challenge which I have to solve with a time limit – I do a search on Google maps, then make a call to make sure they have what I need, then follow the turn by turn directions. I’m sure I could do the same thing on other phones, but not as quickly, and I would waste time doing things which the iPhone does seamlessly.

Of course there are things I would change about this phone – all of which have been mentioned previously, but those are all features like seat warmers or a power sun roof. They don’t change how the car drives.

Honestly, I don’t care who bought it the day it came out or who is waiting for 3G iphone, do what you want. I’m happy with my Blackberry that I got from Sprint SERO free (actually -$100 after rebates) and my $30 a month unlimited data and texting and 500 minute plan. If you choose to spend more than that so be it. Paying that kind of money for a phone and data plan is just not something I have any interest in.

@AlexTNOA: I don’t know if it’s a fair analogy to a Kitchenaid mixer. The $400 +/- spent on a Kitchenaid mixer is a lifetime purchase. The motor is a workhorse and the attachments are universal with all past/present/future Kitchenaids.

At the end of the day, the iphone is a fancy cell phone, and I doubt if any of the early adopters will still be using it in 5 years.

I don’t care who bought iPhones at all, though I do find it curious that people are so invested in them that they care what other people think and they feel they have to flaunt them by making sure everyone knows they have one.

People may think I’m just envious of the expensive Apple tech that I can’t have, but the truth is that I don’t want any cell phone and I can easily afford anything I want when it comes to consumer electronics. I just don’t care and I don’t want to be available to anyone who feels like ringing me up any time and anywhere I happen to be.

Seriously, it’s not a good sign if you identify so much with an electrical device. It doesn’t matter who makes your gadgets. You shouldn’t feel they define you or provide insight into what sort of person you are. If that’s not why people flaunt them, then they are really just consumerist whores trying to show off because they have some insecurity.

“Sent from my iPhone,” indeed. It’s not telling me what you think it is.

Too bad your store credit had a clause that subtracted a percentage of the balance over the duration… Now you have a $34 credit balance.. LOL
Just kidding! That’s great and what a smart consumer you are. I have no desire whatsoever to get an iPhone because I’d rather cut my left hand off before I left verizon wireless.

Cell phones have been terrible over here. The software always sucks and the hardware is barely better. Even the iPhone killers are clueless. Copying the hardware and throwing on crap software at the last minute doesn’t work!

This is why the Nokia N95 is still my Jesus Phone nearly two years after introduction. Sadly, Nokia never bothered to promote it properly here in the U.S., and never partnered with a carrier to subsidize it (probably because the U.S. carriers are rotten companies to do business with). That iPhone UI is sweet, but nothing else about it is. I long for the day Nokia figures out that S60 can be a great OS and have an intuitive UI, but who knows if that will ever happen. Their current touch UI demos are pretty depressing.

The iPhone is such a triumph of form over function–and its tightly controlled software model is so locked down–that my stomach knots up whenever I see someone using it. It’s gorgeous, but there’s so much it can’t do or that Apple won’t allow you to do! The iPhone’s success has taught me that good marketing can actually change a whole product category, although it probably also benefited from Apple’s reputation and, yes, the sorry state of the cellphone market in the U.S.

I guess I’ve got to give credit for putting smartphones, previously pretty much only targetted towards business users, in the hands of the unwashed masses. That said, most smart phones definitely have MORE features than the iPhone and of course more available as add-on software.

What the iPhone DOES do it certainly does better, but all these people who upgraded from a RAZR to the iPhone and then raved about “more features than any phone I’ve ever used!” are really really annoying. “OMG you can surf the web on a phone! Thank you Steve Jobs for partnering with Al Gore to invent the mobile Internet!”

@Michael Belisle: It’s not hard to look at the streetsigns that are posted at every corner. I agree that a proper GPS would be nice, but DC is good about labelling their streets, and is on an easy to follow grid. I’ve made the walk from that area to the Dupont Circle Metro while drunk many times.

@EndlessMike: DC is the WORST city for navigating. There are 4 different versions of every street (NW, SW, SE, NE), they don’t properly label on ramps to 495 or OFF 495 so you don’t know if an exit takes you to 95 or is the beltway or what.

I would have been SO lost this winter had it not been for Google maps on my cell phone.

The 3G iPhone is a compelling phone for me, except its on AT&T, and the “new” service plans are insanely expensive- and don’t even include text messages? WTF?

I may still get one, as I use iTunes and the iTunes store for my music, but the service plan price gouging is really making me thing twice. And I am a Sprint customer, and they basically are willing to give the service away at this point to keep you. Too bad all their phone suck. The Instinct- bleh.

My favorite part is when he said:
“I might have actually had to get out of the car and ask directions.”

Oh no! You might have to talk to some rural local (cue music for Deliverance). Then again I hate the whole concept of GPS navigation systems too. Sure if you drive for a living it could be handy, but for the rest of us not so necessary. Then again, I drove a truck professionally for 5 years and pretty much always know how to get home no mater where I am.

My point is that we are learning to be helpless due to all of these gadgets. I love my shiny electronic toys as much as the next guy. But some people really seem hopeless without them.

@chargernj: You tool. He clearly was saying that sarcastically. And just because someone doesn’t want to ask for directions, doesn’t mean that in the future he’d be unable to do so. I think if he lost his iPhone and had to ask for directions, he’d figure out how to accomplish the task real quick, thus not rendering him “hopeless.”

I’m glad I returned mine two days after it came out. I remember going back into the Apple store. Everyone was buying an iPhone and I was returning it. They all gave me weird looks on why i was returning my phone. I got back my $600 bucks back and walked away happy.

I love tech, but I just don’t see what the fuss is all about. I have a great camera that takes great photos. I have a great mp3 player that plays great music – for working out, not walking down the street – or God forbid – DRIVING. And I have a Motorola phone that gives good phone. And it doesn’t take photos or play music.

I think the analogy stands – you could conceivably still use an iPhone for as long as they upgrade the software and keep it compatible to the first gen. Kitchen-Aid mixers are workhorses, but do you see anyone using one which is over 10 years old in a professional setting?

Actually, the analogy wasn’t regarding the workhorse nature of the Kitchen-Aid, of which I am never failed to be impressed by, but rather, the elegance of the solution it has found to mix ingredients or grind meat or knead dough. People use it because it is the best way to do a task. People keep it because it is a workhorse.

Hey, I am an early adopter too and am glad I bought it. I also took the next step to buy Apple Stock. So a real believer I think (see my blog for more on this). The 3G model should be sweet so I’m going to get that one too and my current one goes to the wife.

I guess I wasn’t clear about why I couldn’t find Fox & Hounds in the post, so let me clarify: If I had known the address of Fox & Hounds, I’d be able to find it, thanks to DC’s magnificent street grid. I didn’t know the address, though, because I was drunk when I went there. I just remembered it was in the Dupont area.

I didn’t address this in the post, but I’m surprised by how many people are concerned about the two-year contracts, given the amount of stories we post about materially adverse changes, and ways to cancel without an ETF. I think AT&T will give customers plenty of outs over time.

@Cynicor: It’s not what it does, it’s how it does it. Because you choose not to see how well the things work together, you’ll never understand what the big deal is and you’ll continue to use superior hardware with inferior software for a mediocre experience.

I used to buy cell phones like crazy trying to find one that did all of the things I needed to do but each one failed in one or more areas and I would move onto the next phone. Until I bought my iPhone on day one last year. I still have it and I’ve used it every day.

@elforesto: You know what I really hate about the iPhone? How developers are falling over themselves to build apps for it when platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile represent several times the market share”

Problem is, Windows Mobile is crap. Every WM device I’ve tried has had to be reset several times a day. Sometimes when the phone is ringing! Idiots.

The whyphone is missing alot of features that are standard on most cheap low end phones. Stereo bluetooth, multimedia messaging, a resemblence of a today screen, tactile buttons……It does however have a very nice screen which drains the battery out very quickly. Needs a built in charger.

never been made fun of for having an iphone – quite the opposite – and i am a business professional user. most of the time when i am out and about and someone needs help with information on anything, they always turn to me. sure, there are a few things that i wish it could do, but what it can do is literally amazing and no other phone even comes close to most features – esp the web experience – using internet on most phones is more of a headache than useful.

and with the new 3rd party apps, enterprise features, and cheaper price, the iphone will have an even deeper market penetration…finally all my friends can get their own and not be so jealous…